On a whim, I picked up one of those Packard Bell/Gateway (Acer) machines mentioned in the OP after seeing it on sale (~€215+VAT). Overall, apart from some niggles; it is a nice little system for the money. In terms of scale it is certainly as size up from the Eee 900, but I was surprised that overall it’s not that much bigger than a 1000H. Not a bad keyboard, and I love the high(er) resolution screen.
Drawbacks include:
-Vista Home Basic. I think both XP (for less bloat/overhead and eking out a bit more performance) and Windows 7 (for an overall sleeker experience) would be better choices (but given the timing of things, I guess that’s why it was so cheap).
-No PowerNow out of the box, but RMClock to the rescue (and the CPU undervolts a bit too).
-“Too fast” RAM using quite loose 333 MHz SPD timings when it would could be running tighter considering the actual frequency is only 240 MHz at 1.2 GHz (and since AMD doesn’t officially ship processors this slow, there’s no 4 CPU/RAM divider).
Speedwise it certainly feels snappier for everyday productivity and browsing use than both the Eee 900 (Celeron M 353 @ 900 MHz) and an Eee 1000H (Atom N270 @ 1.68 GHz when plugged in) I’ve got to compare with. The Atom tends to equal it in multithreaded synthetic benchmarks, though; but it is also the slowest of the three in single threaded apps.
I haven’t had much quality time with any Atom Z520 systems, but given the clock speed of those I’d say the Athlon is significantly faster for anything but HD decode. Of course, there are also the Celeron M 723/Core 2 Solo SU3x00 ones around for netbook-like 11.6” machines that are faster, but those start at more than twice what I paid for this one.
The IGP is also a noticeable step up from the GMA 950, but it seems hampered by the slow RAM situation and the lack of vertex shaders (dropping the core clock from 300 to 110 MHz via PowerPlay has a relatively minor impact on performance). As I expected, there was no DXVA for HD content, yet some lowish bitrate 720P WMA clips (WMP11) and Apple 720P movie trailers (MPC-HC) managed to play without frame drops (although just barely).
Battery life (48Whr) is decent but not great. Watching a movie with wireless on, while intermittently checking a couple of web pages and doing smaller installs for a couple of hours, yielded a discharge rate of ~13W. Doing pretty much nothing besides typing with a dimmed screen was ~10W and running full tilt double that.
Given what’s in there (i.e. that CPU is *huge*), I understand why AMD haven’t been more aggressive in going after this market. Yet at the same time it’s also almost a well rounded platform. Hopefully their upcoming 45nm CPUs + RS780E arrive soon and comes within striking distance of Intel’s CULV offerings in terms of performance. Cost and full load power consumption should certainly improve for them, so I’m not quite as pessimistic on AMDs behalf as I was before trying this system. Choice is good, so I’m rooting for them to pull out something competitive.
